from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Algorithmic trading is changing the way the stock market game is played, as human reaction times are no longer fast enough to keep up with machines that can make nearly instantaneous decisions about stock trades. A human chess grandmaster takes about 650 milliseconds to recognize when a king piece has been put in check, but it doesn't take anywhere near that long for a computer to perform a few profitable transactions. In 2010, the "flash crash" caused the stock market to plunge for a few minutes, and the SEC published a report on its findings of what happened on that day, but there may be a lot more market instability caused by machines -- and we're only started to recognize the implications. Checkmate, humans!